10 songs, an hour of new American music.



4/12/07 review:



Blind Willies' debut, The Unkindness of Ravens, has been knocking around my CD player for quite a few months now, quietly haunting random moments of my life during this tail end of winter and early spring. As the days grow longer and the East Coast slowly emerges from icy temperatures, I've come to love this disc rather a lot - so much so, that I find words are failing me. How can one truly relay the maddening beauty of the first crocus poking through the dry, cracked Earth to someone who has never seen it happen? How can I possibly explain something like the Blind Willies song, "Last Rites in December", in such a way that you'll understand how breathtaking it is?



Blind Willies are Annie Staninec (fiddle) and Alexei Wajchman (guitar, vocals), a duo that met while at San Francisco School of the Arts. Staninec and Wajchman, both accomplished musicians, made their professional debut as Blind Willies in 2004 at San Francisco's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Since then, they've played a variety of venues and recorded their first release - a collection of ten acoustic tunes featuring the fiddle, guitar, and a bit of harmonica.



There's nothing overtly unexpected on The Unkindness of Ravens, but Blind Willies play incredibly wonderful music. Alexei is a remarkable songwriter whose lyrics go well beyond the average ramblings of most singer-songwriters. Even "Mainline" - with its "hungry pawn store prisoners" - is well-crafted enough to run with the big boys and Wajchman wrote the song at the tender age of 15. Annie's fiddle is the perfect accompaniment for Alexei and it's the soft wails from her instrument that really give this album an overall feel of quiet desperation - like waking up in a cold sweat with traces of a nightmare clouding your mind.



Tracks like the seven minute long "Something in the Night" are further proof of Alexei's knack as a wordsmith; here, he sings "there's something in the night/even when you're blind/taking drugs to cancel time/that keeps your eyes wide open and your heart clenched tight" and the scene almost materializes right in front of you. Still, it's the opening track, "Last Rites in December" that gives me butterflies every time I hear it. This song just has that certain something that makes it stunning and I find myself returning to it over and over again. "Last Rites in December" is Blind Willies' perfect blend of instruments and voice(s). As Wajchman and Staninec sing "there's no warmth in this city/there's no joy in this lover of mine/so I'm leaving with nothing/I think I'll make it this time" you can feel not only the heartbreak, but the delicate new leaf of hope.



Although I'm sure my words are woefully inadequate, I cannot urge fans of all sorts of folk music enough that they should not miss out on The Unkindness of Ravens. The opening track alone is sufficient to pay for this debut CD, but there are nine other gems just waiting to be discovered.



-Jennifer Patton, Editor, Delusions of Adequacy

Blind Willies’ subjects range from urban street life to the vagaries of personal relationships. Annie is an inventive improvisational fiddler, and Alexei plays a passionate guitar that gives his lyrics a raw immediacy, providing the foundation for Annie’s interpretive riffs. Their style can be deceptively innocent as in Mom Says No, the song Alexei wrote for a family audience; cynically and hilariously pointed as in Shark Out of Water; or plaintively critical as

in If You Was a Good Pimp, a funky blues rant against bad management.



"If the Devil went down to San

Francisco where Blind Willies are

located and challenged Annie to a

fiddlin' contest it would be no contest

because you cannot fiddle like this

without divine intervention. Blind

Willies prove once again that

traditionally styled folk music can

sound aggressively modern."

jill no jack

indieheart

Heart of the Night podcast #64

1/31/08

=======================



Imagine the White Stripes driven by the fevered folk of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, and you might get some idea of where the Blind Willies are coming from. Duo Annie Staninec and Alexei Wajchman have brought a punky attitude to bear on songs whose templates have long histories.



Alexei's voice drawls and snarls over agitated guitar, while Annie's fiddle playing gives the music it's whirling, devilish heart. Like Meg and Jack before them, they combine to create a sound bigger than the mere sum of their parts.

High points include the rich, sneering sarcasm of "Mom Says No," the bluesy, Jagger-esque swagger of "Shark Out of Water," and the dark gypsy sorcery of "Sinners Medley."



The line between the past and present is muddied in the melée: You can as easily imagine "If You Was a Good Pimp" being penned in a dingy prohibition-era juke joint as by Snoop Dogg. It's this sound, of traditional music being seized by musicians with new, fiercely held ideas of their own, that makes this album so invigorating.



Keith Laidlaw, KQED, 7/4/08

====================================



All too often, musicians take the path of least resistance in an attempt to be universally 'popular' so it is refreshing to come across an album that has something

to say that is worth saying.



The greatest gift of Everybody's Looking For A Meal is that each time you return - and believe me you will - you'll discover a completely different album in front of you.



But be warned in place of sugar coated, banal nonsense you'll find an album that demands as much of the listener as it did of its creators.



Michael Mee, Americana UK, 7/31/08

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Meal Ticket, CD Baby review, Paul Landers, 8/08



A radical album. That’s all you need to know. Like The Unkindness of Ravens, their first CD, this one is a collection of stories that construct a powerful telling of what it’s like to be alive, to be hungry, to feel the pain of desire and denial, to struggle through a day and to come out in one piece on the other side of one’s dreams. Whether Alexei Wajchman’s

narrator is a child expressing want, a prostitute demanding simple respect, a homeless drifter dreaming of a lost life, or a

lover betrayed, the intelligence of his lyrics gives a heightened poetic realism to the unsentimental testaments these characters deliver. Now add a musical universe of genres that suck up every American influence stirring the melting pot culture at large, played by two early twentysomething musicians who seem to have rocked together since birth, and you

have some notion of what’s going on here. Annie Staninec’s fiddle is a Tower of Babel unto itself. If there was music outside while the masons and carpenters and water carriers were working their way up that spiral Jacob’s Ladder, it sounded exactly like her fiddle does in Sinners Medley. Her vocabulary is endless, electric, melodious, and certifiably

mad. She’s as comfortable in funk, gospel, blues, jazz, country, old-time religion, cabaret, and rock, as she is in a Yiddish

vernacular that breaks your heart while you’re catching your breath. Wajchman is also a powerful guitar player. He plays what looks like a dreadnaught tank. His rhythm has a pulsing kick that drives his fiddle player into what sounds like mystery revealed. Their work on If You Was a Good Pimp is drop dead on. A quick rundown of the other songs. Mom

Says No is so good they had to do it twice, at the beginning in Alexei’s sneering complaint, and at the end sung by Annie in a tone that’s innocent but strangely ominous. Trampin’ is gospel turned on its head. They’ll crucify a stranger though he’s done his time. Heaven isn’t all the false prophets promise. The title track, Everybody’s Looking for a Meal, is a beautiful, rocking anthem of daily human conduct. Imagine it played by a marching band at our next president’s Inaugural. Don’t Trade In Paradise is a reflection of what we lose when we leave. The places we run away from are never far behind, never far from haunting. The music is a perfect sphere of melody and intention. Sinners Medley begins with a Yiddish

traditional about a Rabbi who dances to keep the Devil down. The fiddler takes us back to a Polish shtetl where reverence and joy are tempered by respect for the unseen but unmistakable dark forces. Alexei berates the congregation in a Yiddish growl that spirals wildly with the fiddle into his original song, Shadows Everywhere, a soliloquy sung by a

fallen man who sees corruption wherever he turns. Then there are the next 5 songs which play like a bildungsroman of love, betrayal, loss, denial, recognition, resolution, survival, and unmitigated scorn. It’s an epic cycle, not a loose word in it, and it takes the album in a different musical direction but still very much about hunger and its consequences. Carnival is a masterpiece of sound and lyric. These songs are blue ballads of a heart laid bare, exposed to the elements, subject to worms, but stronger for having been eaten alive. Shark Out of Water is a party song. There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t understand the poisonous smile Wajchman nails mercilessly to the cross. I’m in awe of the beauty and bedrock sensibility of this record.